To Outrun the World
by DorianGray91
Summary: Spain, 2012. On a seaside holiday, Lizzie's dreams unearth memories of a ragingly beautiful life. Familiar faces reappear; the chance to kindle an incomplete romance occurs. But is her reincarnation due to luck, or more ominous motives? Can she alter her past or make the same choices? Most of all, how do former champions of freedom survive the bleak routines of a modern world?
1. Stirrings

**1**

_"The world used to be a bigger place."  
"The world's still the same... There's just less in it."_

* * *

The air, still humid even past midnight, was tinged with a sweetness not unlike freshly baked bread. Palm tree leaves swayed and rustled within touching distance of the balcony edge.

Lizzie leaned over it a little further, liquid dark chocolate eyes fixated on the horizon.

The beach of Costa Daurada lay stretched out before her just across the empty roads and cycling lanes, like a smooth score of tan chalk smudged over with black.  
Darkness was painted over the sea too. The whole view was one great sweep of an inky brush, layered just visibly where the sable sky met the water.

She was watching the thin strip of ocean where the moonlight hit its waves, coaxing them into a dusky grey spangled with translucent white flashes. The closer cresting surges that slapped at the shore were the most mesmerizing - constantly changing, catching the surreal moonbeams only to throw them away again as they dived and rolled.

Lizzie had been to Spain before, when she was seven, and to Italy when she was twelve. Both times they had stayed by the coast - her father and mother and she - but every other holiday had been America or Switzerland or France, far inland.

She watched the coal-coloured enigmatic sea, and it also seemed to watch her. As though it recognised this twenty year old Elizabeth, grown out of her childish swimming costumes and gappy teeth.  
Because the thing about it was - she frowned, and brushed her long fringe out of her eyes - the thing about it _was_ that the ocean felt more familiar than it should.

More familiar than anything.

Aged seven and twelve she'd noticed nothing, or hadn't understood. The difference now was that, though she still didn't understand, she felt as though she ought to.

Even with her lids tightly shut in a giddy confusion, the gentle breathing of the tide may as well have been the background to her whole life.

It was an infuriating paradox. Looking out over it, she could feel an immense anonymous pull at her gut, at her breath ripped from her lungs, at her entire self from the roots of her hair to her soles. All of her focus was drawn to that shoreline, upon those tumbling waves.

She needed to run, down the flight of stairs from the apartment, across the street, down the sands, and then.  
And then, what?

She had been there already this week; leaving the sun beds her parents were anchored to, she'd wandered over the dunes, dipped her toes in the thin slips of water that first kissed the shore, then chased them into the shallows and waded up to her stomach and stood there, waiting.

Nothing whatsoever had happened.

The excitement - the lure - the whatever it was - seemed to have crept further out as she'd pursued it, challenging her.

Fifteen minutes later, Lizzie and her father had pushed a pedalo onto the water while her mother watched the sunbeds and bags.  
"This is fun," he'd grinned as they snailed out, rocking with the waves, "so where to? South America? The Caribbean?"

He showed an unusual amount of spirit for a politician, but that wasn't why Lizzie flinched, or why a bolt of ice shot through her body.  
For a second she'd thought, _this is it, this is_ it -but the feeling had slunk away as quickly as it had arrived, and the ocean seemed utterly empty and the breeze too heavy.

Somehow, she knew the answer - if there was one - didn't lie in any distance. It was more about what she was _doing _there. As though something bigger was supposed to happen.

Now, with the witching hour's ambience making the world glitter and chime in the starlight, with the Mediterranean crouching at such a tempting distance, she couldn't resist it.  
She tiptoed inside, grabbing a pair of sandals as she made for the front door.

The wet hit her like nothing else ever could. Cooling, satisfying, gorgeous. It sucked at her ankles like it was scanning her, sussing her out. Or welcoming her. Maybe both.

It gave nothing away though - only tugged her gaze towards the sharp line of moonlit sea against murky air. Her heartstrings twinged simultaneously.

Something was out there that was meant to be her's. Had been her's.  
A long time ago, but not when she was young. The emotion was too fierce, too complicated and conflicted, to be a child's. She had been herself and not herself.

She was talking nonsense.

Suddenly she jumped, and nearly cried out, straining her eyes into the darkness, where a moment before they had only been resting lazily.  
She couldn't have seen it - there were no boats like it on this coast. They were all glistening, sleek white, so modern.

But her gut told her it had been there, or at least a ghost of it. An old wooden ship with tattered black sails, cruising just on the edge of the white waters, far out where the unnamed pull of desire had guided her stare.

A black ship on a black horizon.  
And it somehow made so much sense.  
Spooked, she turned tail and fled all the way back up the beach and dived into her cool, light bed sheets.

But the image ran with her, and hovered above her like a night bird as she pulled the covers around herself. In the shadows of unwatched corners, it waited to enter her dreams as she surrendered herself to sleep.


	2. Keyholes

**2****  
**_"__For sure, you have to be lost to find a place that can't be found__.__"_

* * *

The heat rushed down upon her like a torrent of fire. Her clothes were heavy, thick, dark.

Of course they were. She was wearing the Japanese armor of a pirate lord.

A stiff Oriental cap held the tumbles of her hair away from her face – practical, masculine. Ready for war.

She was striding with such purpose, such confidence, and yet an awful knot of horror and trepidation writhed in her stomach.  
Sand parted softly beneath her pointed shoes, sweltering beside the serene blue beat of the waves encroaching upon their thin strip of land.

_Their _strip – belonging for this moment of parley to herself, Captain Hector Barbossa, and Captain Jack Sparrow.

She didn't have to look for them pacing sedately as they flanked her, to know them truly from the crowns of their distinctive hats to the folds of their leather boots. She could sense the sharp-edged unity between the three of them, so tense and yet so unyielding.

That was, until she gave Jack away to Davy Jones in just a few moments. In exchange for her partner's freedom.

He would forgive her, though, if they got out of this alive. He would understand.  
Though she shouldn't _want _his forgiveness or his understanding.

He had tried to sell her lover off to Jones before now, and had only recently placed him in more danger by leaving him in the path of Cutler Beckett.

He deserved his comeuppance. Whether he had voted her Pirate King or not.

So she blamed her clammy hands on the searing intensity of the sun overhead, and pressed on towards the trio of figures waiting for them at the end of the strip. One of these being her future husband, the two others her future victims.

The sharp-cut outlines of an octopus-human and East India Trading Company uniform seemed oddly placed, next to the graceful silhouette of the man she belonged to.

She abruptly realised that she had seen this all before, that she knew what would happen next, and that therefore she must be dreaming.

"Jack!" she gasped aloud as she lurched upright.

Gradually she gazed about, and neutral cream walls and brown covers smoothed over the tumultuous half-forgotten images.

She didn't know why she had shouted that name, of all names.  
She should have been forming another word. A word that perched on the tip of her tongue, but evaded her the more she thought on it.

The vision had been so clear and so detailed. Nothing she'd experienced before.

So why was it all such absurd nonsense? Why the man with a sea creature for a head? Why a navy fleet? Why all the funny names and flamboyant costumes?

Her skin still felt as though it were blistering from the exotic heat, her eyes stinging from the sand's iridescence.  
She jumped into a cold shower, and helped herself to pancakes for breakfast.


	3. Names

**3  
**_"__The only rules that really matter are these: what a man can do__,__ and what a man can't do.__"_

* * *

"Elizabeth, are you sure? You really don't want to carry on down to La Marina? There are so many nice places there."

Lizzie shook her head sharply and took a seat within the perimeters of the musical bar. Her parents followed reluctantly.

"I can understand you want to be somewhere that feels a bit more _young_."  
"It's not that."  
"Is there somebody you like who works here?" her father permitted himself a doting smile.  
"_No_."

Her mother, anxious to diffuse the torrent of queries and retorts, fanned herself with a menu and interrupted. "I think I'll have a Cosmopolitan, if that's alright with you, dear."

"It's just the name." Lizzie pressed as her dad opened his mouth again.  
He blinked. "What, La Calypso? What's so special about La Calypso?... What's in a name?" he beamed abruptly to himself.

She huffed, and grabbed the menu. Any chance for him to recite a Shakespearean sentence. He threw them in like punch lines, and they were never amusing. Especially not now, when she was so confused already.

"I want a Long Island. Please."  
Again she knew she'd chosen the drink because of its name. Because of the image it provoked of the slim strip of sand she had walked last night in her real dreams.

Now in her mind's eye, it was a Jamaican woman with a black-stained smile who waited for her at its end.

* * *

Once again it was past midnight, and her old-fashioned parents were snoring lightly in their swanky air-conditioned room.

Once again, Lizzie was ankle deep in the surf. It felt like taking an old friend by the hand… although this friend wasn't old. She was ancient.  
_She _was definite, for with the cool beauty of her swathing around Lizzie's legs, she knew instinctively and without effort, without even having to dream about it, that the ocean was more than a watery horizon. The ocean was a form of consciousness, an organism, and far beyond into the realms of ethereal omniscience.

Like a goddess.

_Calypso_. It all made so much sense now, the strangely seductive pull of that shabby musical bar.  
Myths already claimed the goddess' existence. It was no great revelation on Lizzie's part. Just the piecing together of a puzzle hidden in plain sight. But it rang supernaturally true with her, it felt more than correct. It felt vital.

Right now she physically couldn't bear to be separated from the sea. She fed off an invisible connection with its life force, she sensed that it fed off her too. She wanted to be there because it wanted her.

Still it didn't speak to her, and still she waited for it to say something helpful.

Only when she became very tired and very wrinkled around her toes, at a very late hour, did the impossibly puzzled girl finally retire to bed.


End file.
